I've been active in the LGBT movement for 35 years, since I came out of the closet at age 19. Cesar Chavez and I were the labor speakers at the huge October 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights and Action on AIDS. I've been arrested three times at gay and AIDs protests. Having thus established my credentials, let me share some perspective. One: To this day there is no national law banning anti-gay discrimination in employment, housing, etc.; in most states such discrimination is still perfectly legal. Two: I suspect that most people don't realize this, that most people believe that, broadly speaking, LGBT rights are established in this country. Three: The fact that the issue at hand at the moment is the right to same-sex marriage--a "right" that only a few short years ago was barely dreamed of*--shows the astoundingly rapid advance of our struggle, and the astonishing leaps in consciousness that have swept this country and the world since the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. Given that strong majorities of younger people support this right, I have no doubt that it will be won in the foreseeable future. Four: At the same time, LGBT people still get bashed, LGBT youth still get thrown out of their homes, and so on. And, as we saw last week in Los Angeles, LGBT people, especially LGBT people of color, get beaten by police when we take to the streets to demand equality.
What it all shows is that with the LGBT movement as with any movement for rights, the struggle advances in starts and stops, but overall the direction is forward. I have no doubt of that.
I also have no doubt of the depth of the alliance between the LGBT movement and the Black civil rights movement. Anyone who thinks otherwise is falling for the right wing's cynical efforts to promote division and disunity. For many years now, every major national civil rights leader and organization has stood strongly for LGBT rights. If anything, this alliance only strengthened during the course of the latest election campaign.
The bottom line is that no one who stands for class unity will subscribe to the patently phony, divisive comparison between the results of the presidential election and the Prop 8 vote, or pit the Black and LGBT movements against each other, or sound any note of negativity to detract from the deeply felt elation at the Obama victory. I want the legal right to marry--believe me, I want it, because my employer reports the money it pays for my domestic-partner benefit coverage as if it were my income and I am taxed on an extra $5000 a year for it compared to married employees whose coverage of husbands and wives is free and untaxed--but I reject any effort to pose this struggle as some kind of challenge to or test of the Black community, particularly at this moment of jubilation at a momentous step forward in the struggle against racism.
In case it needs to be said more plainly: the culprit here is no one else but the organized right wing. Religious reaction in particular. The racist, sexist, anti-gay Mormon church more in particular. And most particularly of all the ruling class because it is the ruling class that stands to gain the most from these attempts to pit communities against each other. Don't fall for it! In case even that needs to be said even more plainly, I'm saying to white LGBT people that this is the time to express stronger than ever our solidarity with the Black community and to tell the racist, anti-gay forces aligned against us that we will not be fooled by their manipulations and we will not be their pawns.
Finally, the Prop 8 vote clearly demonstrated the limitations of bourgeois democracy. Matters of civil rights should not be up for vote. They should be basic and ineradicable. This is one more reason why a sweeping federal LGBT rights law is needed. And why we've got to stay in the streets, because that, not the voting booth, is where rights are ultimately won.
*A historical note: I was one of the co-founders, in 1986, of the Lesbian and Gay Labor Network, a precursor to what became the AFL-CIO's official LGBT constituency organization, Pride At Work. At the June 1986 lesbian and gay pride march in New York, we in the LGLN contingent coined and chanted a new slogan: "Get your lover covered! Equal benefits now!" I believe this was the first of the demands that can now be seen as laying the basis for the same-sex marriage fight, which after all is about simple legal equality.
